That was all it took. They were there, in the heart of it, and in the next moment someone took the wine off his hands and he and Joanie each had a martini thrust at them and Joanie was chatting up Ken’s wife, Fanchon, who had a pair of pillowy lips, spoke with a French accent and wore her black hair in a bouffant with the bangs hanging sexily in her eyes, like the girl in The 400 Blows. Some of the other grad students drifted over to say hello—Rick Roberts, Charlie Millhouse, a wife, a girlfriend—and make him feel at home when he was feeling anything but, and where was Tim? Wasn’t this supposed to be a session?

Charlie—short, square shouldered, with an outsized head and eyes set too close together, which just managed to draw your attention to them all the more—had his arm around a redheaded girl Fitz hadn’t caught the name of because he was bad with names and introductions, too hung up on subliminal gestures and the pure animal presence of other people to focus his attention. Which was a failing, he knew it, and the reason he always felt uncomfortable at parties. Or part of the reason. His mother claimed he was reserved. Joanie called him shy. But the truth was it just took him a while to get a read on people. Or that was what he told himself.

Charlie had a cigarette in one hand, the one attached to the arm thrown over the girl’s shoulder, and an empty glass in the other. “You like this music?” he asked, jerking his chin in the direction of the stereo while Coltrane floated his arpeggios just out of reach and the party buzzed around them.

The answer was yes, a definite yes, but he couldn’t tell from Charlie’s inflection whether he was looking for affirmation or negation, so he just nodded and shifted his eyes to the girl, whose name popped into his head at that moment—Patricia—and tossed the question back at her. “And what about you, Patricia, what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” she said, turning her head to draw Charlie’s cigarette to her lips and take a quick puff, which she exhaled in a thin blue cloud. “It’s all the same to me. And the name’s Alice, by the way.”

Charlie, still holding fast to her, leaned in, his cheek pressed to hers, to pull the cigarette to his own lips. “The reason I ask,” he said, exhaling, “is because to me this is exactly what Tim should play during the session, but he always goes for mellower stuff, string quartets, Satie, Debussy, and if it’s jazz it’s going to be the MJQ, you watch.”